Making YouTube Pay

How do you make this pay?

YouTube uploads an astonishing number of videos, more than 23 hours of video every minute.

People also look at an astonishing number of videos – more than 1 billion views a day.

As the web moves to video, YouTube is to content as www was in the 90s. That is, a largely unfocused, unmonetized morass of material.

There is something significant happening here, but as of yet, no one has been able to figure out what to do with all this stuff, or more importantly, how to make it pay.

Now, Reuters may have an answer, or at least a small approach.

David Carr, in The New York Times has written about a new project by ThompsonReuters called Reuters Insider.

What Reuters Insider does is to provide in video form up to the minute information on markets and investments.  People, it turns out, like watching videos a lot more than they like reading.

The effort also tells us something about the place online video now occupies. “The trend that we are seeing in professional information is not all that different than consumer media,” said Devin Wenig, chief executive for the markets division of Thomson Reuters. “People are increasingly visual, and they expect to access information in that way. They want to be able to look at a chief executive and see the expression on the analyst’s face.”

Reuters has invested $100 million in the project and they seem to think that subscription video narrowcast feeds are the future of the online information business.

They plan on charging subscribers up to $2000 a month for the service.

Reuters will not only aggregate existing material, they will also help their clients create their own video based information feeds:

As part of the initiative, Reuters is sharing a suite of elegant and easy tools for desktop video production, even if some of the footage that comes back looks like a hostage video. “Not everybody is going to take to this immediately,” said Mike Stepanovich, the managing editor of Reuters Insider, diplomatically. “Some of our partners will be quicker adopters than others.”

Reuters seems to believe that the future of information transmission online is in video.  And they also seem to believe that video literacy will be a key tool for businesses – not only to be able to watch video, but also to communicate in it.

We could not agree more.

And if financial news is one venue for subscription based online video information, we are sure there are many more.

Michael Rosenblum

For more than 30 years, Michael Rosenblum has been on the cutting edge of the digital video journalism revolution. During this time, he has lead a drive for video literacy, and the complete rethinking of how television is made and controlled. His work has included: The complete transitioning of The BBC's national network (UK) to a VJ-driven model, starting in 2002. The complete conversion of The Voice of America, the United State's Government's broadcasting agency, (and the largest broadcaster in the world), from short wave radio to television broadcasting and webcasting using the VJ paradigm (1998-present). The construction of NYT Television, a New York Times Company, and the largest producer of non-fiction television in the US. Rosenblum was both the founder and President of NYT TV, (all based on this paradigm (1996-1998). The President and Founder of Video News International, a global VJ-driven newsgathering company, with more than 100 journalists around the world. (1993-1996). Other clients include Spectrum News, Verizon and CBS News.